APRIL 22, 2025
Over the past two years, FCWA hosted a series of dialogues, focus groups, and hearings for workers across the food chain to discuss how they’re experiencing the climate crisis now, and to uplift a food worker vision for climate and environmental justice. Many of our members are engaged in this work already, whether fighting to establish heat protections for workers, stop the use of pesticides, or defend communities from air pollution.
This Earth Day, we’re releasing a new platform based on these conversations and a Food Worker Climate Justice Declaration to guide our movement building and organizing into the future. It is critical that our food worker movement fight alongside the global movement for climate and environmental justice. Equally, our comrades fighting the climate crisis must center worker leadership and support worker organizing. Click here or read below to see what workers are saying about climate justice and the priorities laid out in our Food Worker Climate Justice Declaration.
“The laws that exist are not sufficient or strong or enforced to protect us.
We decided to take climate change as a central issue in our union in
Washington… It is an issue that is very local but international at the same time.”
– Familias Unidas por la Justicia
“Temperatures have been unbearable for bakery workers in the past year.
Bake rooms are reaching over 100° with no air conditioning and bosses
dictating to stop complaining, and ‘get in there and make bread.’ Workers
passing out, leaving work, even dying of heat stroke — workers that we don’t
think of as being affected in cities.”
– Bakery Worker
“There is an increase of animal pests, so the use of pesticides goes up. Pesticide
effectiveness goes down, which causes even more pesticides to be used. With the
higher heat, the chemicals become vaporized, which equals more pesticide
exposure for farmworkers.”
– Farmworker